Tinie Tempah - grime reject

29/09/2010

Rising rap star Tinie Tempah has said that when he first starting working in the grime scene he found it tricky getting on, saying that he felt rejected and that people didn’t trust him because he hadn’t grown up with them.

Tempah looks set to go number one at the weekend with his new single ‘Written In The Stars’ after it sold over 54,000 copies in two days, and is now one of the main faces of Britain’s new wave of tabloid-backed domestic MCs on their way to stardom. However, it wasn’t always that way.

‘For a very long time up until recently I had to force my way into things,’ he told the Daily Star. ‘The underground scene where I came from was very cliquey - full of people who knew each other from the same estate or school.

‘For a long time they’d say I wasn’t really one of them. But my manager, who is my cousin, and I didn’t care and started funding my own videos and making songs - we saw the bigger picture.’